It's late afternoon on a Monday and Paul Roberts is indulging in a favorite pastime. He's hanging out at pal Michael Landau's Longmont smoke shop, Havana Manor at 1240 Ken Pratt Blvd., and relishing a Liga Privada, a handcrafted cigar made by Drew Estate, the popular premium cigar maker that uses tobacco grown in Nicaragua.

Roberts is a restaurateur and chef -- he owns Joe's of Longmont and Two Dog Diner, also in Longmont. He likes discovering how the smoke from different cigars awakens different parts of his palate.

"I'm a chef, and I enjoy the different flavors of the cigars," Roberts said. "Cigars are very complex -- (I taste) anything from cedar to cocoa to coffee."

Next weekend, Roberts will be one of about 2,000 cigar connoisseurs attending the fourth annual Rocky Mountain Cigar Festival at Boulder's Millennium Harvest House. The light-'em-up cigar party, put on by Boulder-based Smoker Friendly, a company that boasts 86 smoke shops in the Rocky Mountain region, will feature heavyweights from the cigar industry, live music, local brews and spirits vendors, food and enough cigars to fill Fidel Castro's personal warehouse. (No Cuban cigars, though; they're still illegal in the United States.)

"The festival is focusing on the art of cigar making," said Joe Liggett, the festival's event manager. "Pride behind these products is very big ... and it's a hard product to perfect."

Several local craft brewers and spirit makers will have a presence at the festival, too. Handcrafted smokes and handcrafted drinks are a good match, said Dan Gallagher, COO of Smoker Friendly.

"Those things lend to a social environment," Gallagher said. "The people that enjoy the craft brews and the craft whiskeys and spirits, it fits well together. It's really a social event to smoke a premium cigar, to have a craft beer. To people that enjoy those types of things, they really do intersect."

Landau said after espresso, which is his favorite drink to pair with a cigar, rum, Scotch and port go well. Liggett, who has been smoking cigars for two years, said he likes to pair a dark stout with a rich, heavy cigar, such as a Maduro. Roberts said he won't be sampling the many brews and liquors available at the festival in order to find a pleasing pairing, however, because he doesn't drink alcohol.

But Roberts is looking forward to getting face time with some of the cigar makers who will appear at the festival. Most premium cigars sold in the United States these days come from tobacco farmed in the Dominican Republic, Honduras and Nicaragua. As a chef, Roberts, who attended last year's cigar fete, is interested in what goes into making a fine cigar.

"They're very interesting characters," said Roberts, of the cigar makers. "We'll talk about the way they harvest the leaves, how they process and cure the tobacco."

Among the three dozen or so cigar makers scheduled to be at the Rocky Mountain Cigar Festival on Aug. 24 are Rocky Patel, Nick Perdomo, Eddie Ortega and Jonathan Drew, the namesake of Drew Estate cigars. A sort of rock star in the industry, Drew will throw a post-festival herf -- cigar-culture vernacular for cigar party -- that evening at The Lazy Dog, 1346 Pearl St., in Boulder.

"These are the superstars of our industry," Landau said. "People are coming from far away to meet those guys. Colorado's a beautiful state, but at the end of the day, they're coming to meet those guys."

There are four ticket-price levels for attendees. Patrons paying at three of the price levels receive cigars upon entry: 30 for general admission tickets, 48 for the VIP level and more than 60 for the executive level. That the two upper-level price tickets -- $185 and $450, respectively -- are already sold out is evidence to the festival's popularity. ($35/non-smoker and $110 GA tickets remain).

The festival drew 1,200 in its first year, and interest has grown since. What's more, people from 33 states have reserved a spot at the fest this year. That took festival co-founder Gallagher by surprise.

"We felt like we could get it to where it would sell out," Gallagher said, "but what's surprised us is how the interest has spread across the country. We're getting people from as far away as the Virgin Islands ... I guess that shows that the premium cigar world is a tight-knit group."

It's a group whose members cringe when people try to lump them with those who indulge in other types of tobacco, said Landau, who has owned Havana Manor for 11 years.

Another aspect of the festival is to help give cigar smokers a political voice. Each ticket holder receives a membership to Cigar Rights of America, an industry advocacy group.

"There's a lot of legislation out there right now against tobacco in general," Liggett said. "One fight premium cigar smokers are making is differentiating their product from the other tobacco products, like cigarettes and chew."

Mostly, though, the cigar festival is about fitting a handmade Tatuaje, Rocky Patel Cellar or Liga Privada No. 9 between your lips, lighting up and enjoying the company of other smokers.

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